Cars would have made a great game, but of course that would have taken effort

Pixar's Cars is a great movie. THQ's Cars is a bad game.

Nice little bit of coincidence: I go to see Cars today and the demo for the game arrives in my mailbox. Nifty. While watching Cars I kept thinking how easy it would be to make the movie into a compelling game, the camera angles and editing already make the movie feel like a really good racing game, and my fingers would twitch while I watched. I was pretty excited about going home and seeing how well the game captures the movie.

First off, I hate waiting, and the demo will make you sit for a few minutes staring at a generic loading screen. You watch the animated Pixar logo, and then you wait for another minute or so. I'm so used to my PC and 360, how did we live with loading times this long on a day-to-day basis? The game is rather bland, and the racing just doesn't feel smooth. It comes off like a generic racing title, something you'd find in the budget bin that happens to have the voices of a few stars in it. There's none of the fun and adventure of the movie in the game. The sound seems mixed poorly as well, the voices are buried under the sound effects and music.

I would have loved to have seen the movie turned into a next-gen racing game, with great graphics and jokes from the movie. As it stands, it's barely mediocre. Do yourself a favor and just see the movie again.

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